Pastors and Politics

“I’m being accused of being controversial and political. I’m not political. But moral issues that become political, I still fight. It isn’t my fault that they’ve made these moral issues political. But because they have doesn’t stop the preachers of the Gospel from addressing them…”

“What then is wrong? I say the problem, first of all, is in the pulpits of America. We preachers must take the blame. For too long we have fearfully stood back and failed to address the issues that are corrupting the republic. I repeat Proverbs 14:34: ‘Righteousness exalteth a nation.’ Not military might, though that’s important. Not financial resources, though that has been the enjoyment of this nation above all nations in the last 200 years. But spiritual power is the backbone, the strength, of a nation.”

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6 thoughts on “Pastors and Politics”

I am not a great fan of Rev. Falwell’s. But I agree wholeheartedly that Christians must not cede the moral high ground. Faith has an important role to play in the public forum (different from attempts to establish a theocracy). Too often, unfortunately, political correctness and/or a misinterpretation of the principle of separation of church and state result in silence.

Yes! The irony is that humanism is presented as the rational alternative to faith — and so much more “tolerant” than Christianity [heavy on the sarcasm]. Tragically, the sins of the organized church served to give humanism a foothold. That was all the adversary needed.

A great many posts I run across maintain we have the source of all happiness within us. However upbeat this may sound, it is another of Satan’s half-truths. It may be accurate to say that the source of happiness is not material. But the source of real joy is not mankind either. It is God under all circumstances, even the most grievous.

Keep writing Dr. Stebbins. We need to more of what Paul called solid food.

There are many well-known Judeo-Christian believers at the national level doing an outstanding job expressing God’s love through controversial issues. Sadly, the local level seems to be characterized by gross indifference. Many local clergy have devolved from spiritual leaders to managers Christian clubs.

At least part of the problem arises from clergy, especially younger ones, having grown up in the same broken culture as the people in their congregations. Even seminary professors are now young enough to have grown up in a broken culture.

People tend to sense the culture in which they grew up as “normal.” It becomes the standard by which they “measure” future changes from normal. People who grew up before the mid-1960s are referred to as old fashioned out of the step with the changing times. Whoa! What are they really saying?

The normal experienced by the pre-1965 folks was the normal experienced by people for the last 400 years, since the earliest settlers, and for thousands of years for all people of Judeo-Christian tradition. It is the current generation that is out of touch with thousands of years of normal. It is not reasonable to compare today’s pseudo-normal with the normal of the previous generation. The comparison is far too simplistic, because the time span is much too short.

The Bible–all of it–expresses God’s love, which is intended to pass through us to others. Even those activities or behaviors forbidden by God are an expression of His great love, because he know that danger and heartache lurk outside those boundaries. Consequently, and cultural changes by definition move away from God’s love and expose the culture to all the tragedies that result when groups of people demand imagined “rights” (other than those few that come from God) without accepting corresponding responsibility. Sadly, cultural chaos is growing, virtually out of control.